"In fact, in Feelingstown, facts become insults: If facts debunk feelings, it is the facts that must lose." Ben Shapiro

Wednesday, June 05, 2013

Thank you for borrowing money for my education

The student loan program has turned into a program where lower class, marginal student borrow student loan money to pay for inflated tuition so that schools can lower the tuition from smart kids from affluent families.......

At least 15 states have explicit policies
under which some of the revenue from students who pay tuition at public
universities goes to others who can’t cover the full cost, according to
the State Higher Education Executive Officers,
or SHEEO. In Arizona, for example, public universities channel about a
quarter of tuition revenue into discounts, grants and other forms of
financial aid. In North Carolina, at least 25 percent of money generated
by any increase in tuition goes to such subsidies, while in California
it is one-third of each tuition increase.Donna Rosato of Money magazine talks about how to cut costs on
college tuition and the strategies parents can use to make their child’s
bachelor’s degree more affordable for the family.

Critics say this penalizes not only full-tuition-paying, high-income
parents and their students, but also middle-class families already being
squeezed by escalating costs. In June, the Iowa Board of Regents ordered the practice to end
in that state within five years. There, some $144 million a year in
financial aid is redistributed to low-income students — as well as
high-achievers who don’t qualify for federal aid — from the tuition
their classmates pay. The regents called for the portion of tuition that
now goes to truly needy students to be replaced by contributions from
the universities’ fundraising arms.Similar appeals have come from the governor of Virginia, Arizona
legislators and members of the University of North Carolina Board of
Governors.Since universities are also offering more scholarships to students
with high grade-point averages and SAT scores, which elevates them in
the all-important U.S. News World Report college rankings — and
since many of those top students come from affluent families and don’t
qualify for federal aid, Gillen said another trend is at work. “Rich,
dumb kids,” he said, “are subsidizing rich, smart kids.”